Here Are All The Hints Hidden In The ‘The Fantastic Four’ Teaser

The Fantastic Four has finally released a teaser and, to be honest, it puts a substantial number of fears to rest. It’s also packed with interesting hints about where the movie will go. And also the Thing is going to run around bare-assed. Let’s break it down shot by shot, shall we?

First up, a montage, overlaid with dialogue about natural human curiosity. The first sign this is a Fantastic Four movie comes early, though:

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And right away, we see this movie is taking a lot of cues from the Ultimate books, because here’s Reed and non-rocky Ben in a garage, screwing with God’s domain. Also of interest? There’s no found footage feel or style to this, so thanks for panicking us about that, Fox.

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Reed being Reed, this naturally transitions into the standard Superpowers Granting Device, a giant tube you can recline in hooked up to a generator.

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If you look closely, the way that device is laid out, there are four tubes. Which, shocking, we know. Interestingly, this somewhat resembles the MacGuffin in the Ultimate books, something the next shot only reinforces. Also of interest, though, is that this doesn’t appear to be the device that makes the four, well, Fantastic. It looks to be a test device, instead. Perhaps Reed and company discover the Negative Zone before they get their superpowers?

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I’ve cropped it and kicked up the contrast, but the resemblance is clearly intentional, and the fact that Reed’s getting his research money from the military is, one suspects, also an important plot point. After that, we get a look at each of our team.

Reed (Miles Teller), who appears to be the hardware guy:

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Sue (Kate Mara), who is working mission control:

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Ben (Jamie Bell), who apparently has nothing better to do than play pick-up baseball at a high school:

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And Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), who, well, yeah, he would be working on a car:

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The next cut is particularly interesting: There are not four, not five, but six people getting onto the more refined dimensional gate/ship/whatever:

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We know who four of them are, the fifth is almost certainly Hacker Doom… but who’s the sixth? A redshirt? A sequel hook? Wolverine, because Fox has to cross over universes?

It’s at this point the trailer just goes into straight “random shots from the movie” mode. The main takeaway here seems to be two-fold, the first being that the team is going to be in the Negative Zone for at least a brief while before the wheels come off, and that once they come back to Earth, the facility their dimension gate is located in is going to be the source of a huge fight. Pretty much all the footage from this montage would seem to come largely from those two sequences. But breaking it down in order…

We see a cargo plane flying over what might, in fact, be Latveria; Reed in the woods wearing what appears to be a destroyed version of his dimensional travel suit:

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The first GIFable moment in the trailer, Ben Grimm waking up to realize he’s going to have a really bad day:

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There’s Sue Storm crying over her brother in what we’re assuming is the Negative Zone:

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We see Johnny catching the hell on fire:

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There’s a bomb going off in New York, although of what kind and its nature is a good question.

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It sure looks like the epicenter is on the street, but it can’t be Sue: She projects force fields, and she’d be destroying buildings with a field that large. Could this possibly be something Doom is trying to pull off?

Also, it appears the Negative Zone sucks in many, many ways:

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That’s followed by what’s almost certainly our first look at Doom, although it’s not much of one:

Johnny and Sue going head-to-head:

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And Reed stretching:

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Probably the most intriguing moment, though, is a brief line of dialogue between Reed and who we’re assuming is Doom, where Doom hints that he’s just the preview, and this final shot:

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Notice that Ben isn’t wearing pants. In fact, none of them are wearing uniforms of any sort. That’s an interesting take on things.

That, by the way, is the dimensional gate from Ultimate Fantastic Four, just in case the fact that they were pulling the plot fairly directly from the comics wasn’t obvious enough.

In short, there is a lot here and it’s all pretty interesting. If you love the Four, this is starting to look like the first movie that really tries to get them right… but, of course, we’ll know in August.

I know I’m in the minority, but I liked Rise of the Silver Surfer. It showed their family dynamic, it got each of their personalities right and the Surfer was awesome. Galactus was a bit of a let down, but a swirling cloud that destroys planets is, in my opinion just as lame as a giant purple man in the sky. At least, it was at the time. I think the MCU could justify Galactus at this point, but Rise of the Silver Surfer didn’t have an entire universe to pull from yet where things like Celestials and Thors already exist.

I dunno… we’ll see what happens. Either way, I know I’ll be seeing it, so it’s not like the quality will really factor into my decision at all.

I co-sign this, except for being okay with Galactus. I still think each one of the actors was very well cast (except maybe Alba, but I’ll forgive her). And I loved VonDoom’s interaction with the Surfer.

I wouldn’t say I was okay with Galactus… I just understand why they’d go the route they did. I’m not sure why they didn’t use the Ultimate GA LAK TUS robot hive instead though. They could have had a hive mind that the Surfer blows up at the end, which would have made a bit more sense than what happens. Either way, it’s not the terrible movie the internet decided it was.

@Dan Seitz, I never thought about it, but I guess he is wearing a metal skirt, right? What else could it be but space metal?

Have you forgotten the Dodge Hemi-powered Fantasticar? I was willing to go along with things right up until that point. I had to have someone describe the rest of the movie to me as my eyes rolled so far back into my head that I could no longer see the screen.

Sure, but the point is, they’re not wearing the same jumpsuit. Johnny’s in his armor stuff, Reed’s in what looks like a trashed version of the dimension-jumping suit, Sue’s in street clothes, and the Thing is naked.

I appreciate the analysis but I think that there’s a mix up in the devices that we see the group climbing into. My interpretation is that the less fancy one (the third screencap) is the one that the team will use to get to the Negative Zone after Doom has done something to allow him through, leading to the events of the later half of the film. That’s just my opinion, but it seems like they use the fancy one, become the Fantastic Four, then have to go back to the Negative Zone with Reed’s clunky, homemade model. Just a theory.

Actually, going back and looking at the uniforms, I think that’s tied to the part in the trailer where they’re stuck in what looks like a crater full of lava. Either way, there’s definitely a ton of Negative Zone in this movie.

The almost total negativity of “the internet” is ridiculous at times. It seems that EVERYTHING is going to suck and there’s no point in making anything, but “the internet” can’t let those who might actually enjoy something have that, so they have to bombard everywhere they go with bile-filled rhetoric slating every single thing.

If you don’t want to watch it, then don’t. If it makes you feel that negative, then just stay away for your own sanity. There are literally hundreds of other films out this year that you can watch, so just let those who are actually looking forward to this and have an optimistic outlook feel OK for liking something.

C’mon, it’s not that hard.

Also, on a side note, in the last GIF, is that an aeroplane inside the light beam?

The device at the end looks like the ultimate universe’s version of the ultimate nullifier. Basically it’s a time device that taps into the energy that was released by the Big Band and channels into a beam of pure destruction. Reed used it against Ultimate Galactus.

Wait a second… Johnny Storm is black? That is the most retarded thing they could’ve done…. Johnny Storm is the whitest guy ever! His whole character is that he’s a nerdy white guy, who thinks he’s super cool because he has powers…. I’m really getting sick of this role reversal bullshit. Changing Nick Fury to a black guy was dumb enough, but it was OK because at least they had changed him in the comics for a while before that… but come the fuck on.

Yeah and James Bond should be white too. In fact, everybody should be white, it’s downright essential to their characters in the sense that as a white person, I’m only comfortable watching white people do stuff!

@Mendel Thanks, man. I’m not really offended by the term “Social Justice Warrior.” As if I should be embarrassed about being in favor of social justice and wanting to fight for it? I mean, I don’t really care about political correctness or whatever bullshit catch-all term for liberals that you’re throwing around, but I think that people like the poster above should be mocked because it’s the laziest, stupidest form of racism based on tradition and wanting to see white majorities in everything.

There is nothing essential about being white for either Nick Fury or Johnny Storm. Even if there was something essential about it, at the end of the day they’re just fictional characters, and so to complain about them casting a black actor in those roles is fucking ridiculous.

I’m sure you really enjoyed Jonathan Chait’s article about the PC police making it tough on white men. Have a good night.